America’s global collapse is happening. Where is Marco Rubio?

Donald Trump’s war of choice against Iran is a strategic failure that has exposed the limits of America’s power and influence in the Middle East and around the world. In a highly unusual move, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been conspicuously absent from the negotiations with the Islamic Republic that led to a tenuous ceasefire, ceding the diplomatic spotlight to Vice President JD Vance, along with the administration’s “peace envoys” Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Steve Witkoff, a billionaire real estate developer and Trump friend. 

A recent New York Times report detailed how expansive Rubio’s absence has been. In addition to missing peace negotiations with Iran in Islamabad, Pakistan, he did not attend meetings in Doha and Geneva. He has not visited the Middle East since last October, nor has he played a direct role in diplomatic negotiations over Ukraine and Gaza.

But the secretary’s absence on the world stage doesn’t mean he has been idle. As the first person to serve simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser since Henry Kissinger in the 1970s, for Rubio “less time abroad means more time at the side of an impulsive president prone to making critical national security decisions at any moment.”

While also attending to Trump’s needs, Rubio has been busy remaking the State Department in the MAGA image — an act that is undermining democracy at home and accelerating strategic failures abroad. What the administration calls “America First” is, in practice, white racial authoritarianism and white Christian nationalism that governs who and what is deemed to be in America’s vital interests.

Historically, the State Department has emphasized cultural pluralism, secularism and inclusiveness in its public messaging and other communications — a deliberate choice rooted in the reality that American diplomacy takes place around the world. 

During the Cold War, America’s elites understood that racism at home made America weak abroad. Jim and Jane Crow were an international embarrassment, giving the Soviet Union a powerful counternarrative about American hypocrisy and the color line. How could a nation that oppressed its own Black citizens claim to be the world’s beacon of freedom against communism?

Civil rights activists understood this and used it for tactical and strategic leverage. Presidents from Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson were forced to see that Jim Crow was not just a moral catastrophe but a geopolitical liability. Ralph Bunche, the Nobel Prize-winning diplomat and civil rights leader, connected the fight against American segregation to the broader struggle for human rights and peace around the world. The State Department, meanwhile, deployed jazz diplomacy and other cultural outreach programs to project, in a carefully curated way, an image of American diversity as a weapon against communism and authoritarian regimes.

These traditions have been largely abandoned under Rubio at the behest of Trump.

On April 1 the State Department announced a series of “reforms” to the foreign service exam with the aim of eradicating “the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda” that the administration claimed was plaguing the department and diplomatic corps. As Puck’s Julia Ioffe memorably noted, these changes — which included an orientation curriculum centered on “America First” — were nothing short of “ideological screenings” and “political tests,” requiring prospective foreign service officers to “affirm their support for Trump’s executive orders…and demonstrate their ‘fidelity’ at every turn.”

Previous administrations understood that having a diverse State Department was a necessity, given how the majority of the world’s population is not white. Limiting the number of Black and brown diplomatic corps members at a time when China is making great inroads in Africa and other parts of the non-white world through infrastructure development, securing rare earth and other vital resources, and building military bases is a strategic blunder.  

The department has also overseen the systematic dismantling of America’s soft power. The gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and related programs that support public health have already contributed to an estimated 762,000 preventable deaths. Experts estimate that these cuts will lead to 14 million preventable deaths by 2030 if funding is not restored.  

Before Rubio’s tenure, Voice of America (VOA) served for more than eight decades as one of the country’s most powerful tools for exporting democracy and American values to people living under authoritarian regimes. Once a credible voice, under the leadership of Kari Lake, a Republican who served as Arizona secretary of state and ran for governor, experienced journalists have been fired and VOA now amplifies the administration’s talking points and disinformation. (A new lawsuit filed by former veteran VOA journalists and free speech advocacy groups Reporters Without Borders, Reporters sans Frontiers, and Pen America alleges that the administration has taken away VOA’s editorial independence in violation of federal law and the First Amendment.)

Since Trump’s return to power, the United States has been repositioning itself as an explicitly Judeo-Christian nation — and government departments and agencies are following suit. On Easter Sunday Rubio shared a video on social media in which he passionately described the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The department’s Instagram account has featured images of Christian crosses and references to “Christ’s sacrifice.” As reported by the Intercept, the account has stopped marking Islamic holidays and other widely observed non-Christian religious observances.

Under Rubio, the department is cutting back on student visas, and it has begun monitoring the social media accounts of immigrants and travelers for material the administration defines as “hateful ideologies” and “hostile attitudes” and other thought crimes. 

At White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller’s urging, White South Africans, a group that enforced and benefitted from the white supremacist system of apartheid, are now being given refugee status on the grounds that they now face oppression under Black majority rule. In a cruel historical irony, White South Africans are now working as laborers under the H-2A guest worker program in Mississippi, where they are now displacing Black American farmers whose families and communities survived Jim Crow, America’s own form of apartheid. It is estimated that 25,000 South Africans came to the United States during the 2024-25 farming season alone under that program. 

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Refugee status is also being revoked for Haitians and Somalis, communities that Trump and his administration have repeatedly dehumanized with racist screeds that have included calling them “poison,” “leeches” and “invaders.” These and other Black and brown refugees and immigrants now live in a state of existential fear from being deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or targeted by racist vigilantes.

In total, the State Department now serves as an enthusiastic enforcer for Trump’s nativist project and fortress America.

In December 2025, the Trump administration announced its new National Security Strategy, which is based on the premise that Europe is facing a common “civilizational erasure,” a lack of economic vitality, “cratering birthrates” and loss of “national identities” from migrants and other non-whites whose values are deemed incompatible with Western values. To survive, the document holds, Europe must move away from its pluralistic and cosmopolitan values. These are far-right talking points evoking racist books such as Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel “The Camp of the Saints” and Madison Grant’s “The Passing of the Great Race.” Previous American leaders would have condemned such a policy as antithetical to America’s democratic norms and values. 

Under Rubio’s leadership, the State Department has abandoned this tradition and strategic vision. As a senator, Rubio was a strong advocate for global democracy. He wanted America to be more confrontational with Russia and backed Ukraine in its freedom struggle. Now, while enduring the president’s humiliation rituals — the public debasements Trump uses to test and bind the loyalty of those around him — Rubio has adopted his values.

As secretary, he now sits fourth in the line of presidential succession, and there is speculation that Trump may see him as a potential successor. According to reports, Trump has taken to asking confidantes if they prefer Vance or Rubio as the party’s 2028 nominee, and focus groups indicate that Trump Republicans are also warming up to the secretary ahead of 2028. Many see him as a stabilizing force, as well as a more presentable and traditional representative for their “America First” nationalism and so-called conservative values.  

Rubio sacrificed his values and the storied institutional legacy of the State Department itself to be in closer proximity to Donald Trump, a chaos agent — and America’s reputation and power are collapsing.